There’s an element of truth to the frequently voiced concern that Obama is engaged in some sleight of hand when he keeps guns as the front story in the news. By doing so, he keeps people distracted from the real news, which is our spendthrift government’s debt. With that in mind, I’m going to taper off on the gun posts, limiting myself today to these three links:

You can see here Obama’s just-announced list of 23 “executive actions” on guns, which range from inconvenient to stupid to impossible. This is grand standing. Even Obama concedes that the ones that require actual legislative action won’t go anywhere. This is more evidence, if you needed it, that Obama’s playing games. This demagoguery feeds the masturbatory frenzy on the Left while directing the nation’s attention away from his dramatic economic failures.

With regard to these executive orders — orders that Democrat Legislators begged for — my friend Lulu commented that one should ask Dems how they’d feel if a Republican president issued a slew of executive orders limiting abortion (which isn’t even an explicitly stated Constitutional right). After all, when the next Republican gets into office, there’s now precedent for executive order over reach outside of the realm of enforcing existing laws or carrying out military goals consistent with the President’s role as Commander-in-Chief.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., provides solid evidence that gun bans mostly benefit criminals. Since reading it this morning, every time one of my liberal Facebook friends has linked to some gun control initiative (i.e., New York’s new bans or the President’s executive orders), I’ve commented as follows: “Americans really have to decide if we want to limit guns or limit violence. The two ends have different means. This article (which I link to in the comment) indicates that, if your goal is to limit violence, limiting guns is, paradoxically, the wrong way to go about it.” I enjoy the mental image of eyeballs exploding.

Lastly, Wolf Howling looks to Mexico, a country with unusually stringent gun controls and unusually widely distributed and extreme gun violence, and uses it as an object lesson showing that leaving guns solely in the hands of criminals (who don’t care that arms are illegal) is a very bad idea.